Moral death

“ And what is its moral proof? We may formulate it thus: Act so that in your own judgement and in the judgement of others you may merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that you may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you were to die to-morrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. The end of morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to discover the finality that belongs to it—if indeed it has any finality—and to discover it by acting. ”

“ It is while living that death possesses its sting and anguish. Anyone that seeks tribute from the dying, or from the living for [Pg 71] services on behalf of the dead, is a damnable moral scoundrel and a cunning rascal. ”

“ What undermines more insidiously every moral principle of the heart; what palsies so entirely every moral faculty of the [21, J] soul; what so soon and so awfully makes man dead while he liveth; what spreads through the whole frame-work of society such rottenness, or so effectually opens the door to all those powers of darkness by which the pillars of public order are crumbled and the restraints of religion are mocked; what so universally excludes from the death-bed of a sinner the consolations of the Gospel, or writes upon his grave such a sentence of despair, as intemperance? ”

“ What are physical sufferings compared to moral tortures? What is the death of a man in the presence of the death of a society? Some day you will perhaps be a great physician, if they let you go your way in peace, but greater yet will be he who can inject a new idea into this anemic people! ”

“ In the path, which if not speedily retraced, will inevitably lead to shame, disgrace, and ruin in this world, and everlasting punishment in the world to come. This is an ensnaring world—the moral atmosphere by which we are surrounded is charged with death. ”

“ To come short of what one might be, steadily, increasingly, brings moral deterioration, atrophy;—to my mind, the saddest form of death. It is life to grow toward the Divine. My son, it will soon be too late. ”

“ And it is not only open vice that lowers the tone a man may even keep all the conventional rules of morality, and yet fall in this manner, if he neglect and ignore a cheerful acquiescence in those high moral aspirations, which alone make the idea of a self-sought death an evil to which nothing on this side of the grave can compare. ”

“ if the unfortunate one, strong in mind, indignant at his fate rather than desponding or dejected, wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it- not from inclination or fear, but from duty- then his maxim has a moral worth. ”

“ It has been shown that spiritual death is nothing more than a partial corruption of the moral qualities of our nature, and even this partial corruption has resulted from personal violation of moral law. ”

“ The moral attributes of death are powers and effects of an infinitely wide and general description, which no individual or physical form can possibly represent, but by courtesy of speech or by a distant analogy. The moral impression of Death is essentially visionary ”

“ There are some who are deceived as to the meaning of death by the cunning use their leaders make of the word where it represents a moral state. DEAD IN TRESPASSES AND SINS The words "You hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2: 1) are quoted and commented on in an attempt to prove that men are not really dead when they are said to be. But if the word death means life, why is it used as the opposite of life? Why not dispense with the word entirely and use the word life? ”

“ We need men with moral courage to speak and write their real thoughts, and to stand by their convictions, even to the very death. ”

“ Why is it that so great and good a Being, a Being who is full of benevolence and love, a Being who is filled with mercy and compassion, should suffer such a dire calamity to befall the human race? Why is it? Is it because He delights in the sufferings of mankind? Is it because he delights to see them writhe in pain and distress? No: it is because man has sinned; it is because he has offended his Maker—because he has transgressed sacred and holy laws, because he has subjected himself to the monster death, to the miseries, wretchedness, and vanities of this life. ”

“ Lived—died—in form and soul a Man,
The image of his God.
Through care, and pain, and want, and woe,
With wounds that only death could heal,
Tortures—the poor alone can know,
The proud alone can feel ”

“ Can there be conceived a more atrocious injury than to filch from its possessor this inestimable benefit; to rob society of its charm, and solitude of its solace; not only to outlaw life, but to attaint death, converting the very grave, the refuge of the sufferer, into the gate of infamy and of shame? ”

“ And our theory defines its Being in terms of this fulfilment.
But death — and, above all, not our own death nearly so much as the death of our friends — is an evil in so far as it appears in our experience as a temporal defeat of the purposes of human love, and of the need of the human world for its good men. Well, this is the other, and, for our own theory, indeed, the more problematic aspect of death. For here the passing fragment of fact is that a given human purpose is so far defeated. ”

“ To compel a person to know all that can be known by the dead, concerning that which the living fear, hope, or forget; to plunge him into the pleasure or pain which there awaits him; to punish or reward him in a manner and in a degree incalculable and incomprehensible by us; to disrobe him at once from all that intertexture of good and evil with which Nature seems to have clothed every form of individual existence, is to inflict on him the doom of death. ”

“ Who has told us, what God can only tell, that misfortunes are judgments, or that death is one? That death which is common to all men? And as to the different and disastrous manners of dying; have not fire and sword, famine and pestilence, poison and torture, wild beasts and accidents, destroyed as many good men as evil men? ”

“ I was made to see that if I would suffer rightly, I must pass sentence of death upon everything that can properly be called a thing of this life, even to reckon myself, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoyments all as dead to me, and myself as dead to them. ”

“ Are we not that, all we who with brow bent under humiliation, injustice, thankless toil; with the heart embittered by tedious deception and tedious despair, miseries of heart and miseries of body, wait, wait ever, wait vainly for a more brilliant sun to shine at last, until at the end of the day there rises before us the only guest we have never expected, on whom we counted not,—the solution of the great problem, the radical cure for all our ills—DEATH.
Death, which with its brutal hand, seizes us at the moment when perhaps at last we are going to rest ourselves and rejoice. ”

“ We forsake nature, and run over to the practices of the people, that never were the authors of anything that is good. If destiny were to be wrought upon by tears, I would allow you to spend your days and nights in sadness and mourning, tearing of your hair, and beating of your breast; but if Fate be inexorable, and death will keep what it has taken, grief is to no purpose. ”

“ The death of others instills in you so much horror that your own death becomes an object of desire; that is to say, if by dying, you would be in some degree useful! One calls to mind deaths which have put an end to angers and to revolts. One only retains this ambition, to be a useful corpse. ”

“ For all that, let us not drag on an aimless, helpless life, infinitely worse than death. Let us not rust out in the purlieus of a dull existence, leading—in the main deservedly so—to insensibility and decrepitude. ”

“ And we are led on to a consideration of the lengthy reflection on the spirit in which the approach of death should be faced, with which he closed the latest edition of the "Maximes," declaring that "the splendour of dying with a firm spirit, the hope of being regretted, the desire to leave a fair reputation behind us, the assurance of being released from the drudgery of life and of depending no more on the caprices of fortune," are remedies which would medicine our pain in approaching the dreaded goal of our existence. ”

“ Nay, to us it is conceivable that to some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality—that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones, and to our many suffering fellow-men, lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence. ”

“ The ambitious, the knave, the tyrant, the sensualist, all the proud sinners who abuse life, and whom Death drags away by the hair, are on their way to a reckoning, no doubt; but the blind, the beggar, the fool, the poor peasant, is there any amends for their long wretchedness in the single reflection that death is not an evil for them? ”

“ Well, I can understand that if I were to make an attempt upon my own life while in the enjoyment of full health and vigour—my life which might have been ‘useful,’ etc., etc.—morality might reproach me, according to the old routine, for disposing of my life without permission—or whatever its tenet may be. But now, now, when my sentence is out and my days numbered! How can morality have need of my last breaths, and why should I die listening to the consolations offered by the prince, who, without doubt, would not omit to demonstrate that death is actually a benefactor to me? ”

“ Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, indeed because of certain forms of death—death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and worry, competency and desert, death of everything that paganism, naturalism, and legalism pin their faith on and tie their trust to. ”

“ Has it not been from of old one chief part of a manly education to make us despise death—teaching us to account it, if an evil at all, by no means high in the list of evils; at all events, as an inevitable one, and to hold, as it were, our lives in our hands, ready to be given or risked at any moment, for a sufficiently worthy object? ”

“ I might elevate my soul to all kinds of altitudes. But with nothing eternal before me but death, given for a brief spell this yeasty crawling and squirming which is called life, why, it would be immoral for me to perform any act that was a sacrifice. ”

“ Yes, and far lower still, past that portion of the righteous man, endless life,—down, down to the humiliation of death; and then one more step to a death—not of honor, and respect, and the peace, that we are told marks the perfect man and the upright, but the death of lowest shame, the criminal slave's death, the cross! ”

“ For we, who might have continued to live, though without glory, choose a glorious death rather than bring reproach on you and your children, and rather than disgrace our fathers and all of our race who have gone before us, believing that for the man who brings shame on his own people life is not worth living, and that such an one is loved neither by men nor gods, either on earth or in the underworld when he is dead. ”

“ It is the death of good—the death of genuine disinterested love; the lapsing into evil and falsity; the loss of all power to know, appreciate, live, or even comprehend the spiritual side of life, and God as its giver. ”

“ This dreadful period of human life, which is death in sin, strikes and appals them: yet, like fools, they blindly and merrily pursue the road which leads to it. In vain do we announce to them, that, in general, men die as they have lived. They wish to live the life of a sinner, yet, nevertheless, to die the death of the righteous. ”

“ In contradistinction to us, who the wiser we are the less we understand the meaning of life, and see some evil irony in the fact that we suffer and die, these folk live and suffer, and they approach death and suffering with tranquillity and in most cases gladly. In contrast to the fact that a tranquil death, a death without horror and despair, is a very rare exception in our circle, a troubled, rebellious, and unhappy death is the rarest exception among the people. ”

“ And yet, and here lies the serious side of life, every one of these fleeting forms, these empty fancies, must be paid for by the whole will to live, in all its activity, with many and deep sufferings, and finally with a bitter death, long feared and coming at last. This is why the sight of a corpse makes us suddenly so serious. ”

“ Is not the mighty mind, that son of heaven!
By tyrant life dethroned, imprison’d, pain’d?
By death enlarged, ennobled, deified? 457
Death but entombs the body; life the soul. ”

“ It is, indeed, a sad commentary on man's wisdom that, with all the distress that inevitably inheres in human life, he should have voluntarily brought upon himself still greater suffering and premature death. ”

“ Moreover, the possibility of a conscious existence beyond the shadow of death had been looming larger and larger for months past, and with that possibility other possibilities had come into view. What if the consequences of conduct followed men into the unseen? What if sin should separate a soul from the soul it loved? What if this life were a trust for which we should be held responsible? What if suicide should be as heinous a crime as murder? What if dying by one's own hand should stain the soul with deeper dishonour than any broken vow or unfulfilled promise? ”

“ Death is the certain doom of all mankind--- To learn to die is an heroic work:--- But thus to die an ignominious death--- Without a trial, or the forms of law, Pronounc'd a traitor---hurry'd from the stage--- Torn from existence as an useless worm, By a base, vile, assassinating hand, Fires all my soul with fury and revenge. ”

“ Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly.... Death certainly, and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure, all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. ”